Five Must-Have Features for Adobe Lightroom 4. Or 5.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has the look of a long-term winner. This $200 (street) photo organizer, indexer, and light-duty editor has become a mainstay of pros and enthusiasts working with hundreds of thousands of images who need to tag, sort, quickly edit, and publish or post. It's nearly a year into version 3 and new versions typically arrive on a 12- to 18-month cycle, preceded by a flurry of wishlists. Here's what's missing from Adobe Lightroom 3 (see pcmag.com review), what should be in version 4 and if it's not (Lightroom 4 is locked in), really has to be in version 5.

Five Features Adobe Lightroom Badly Needs

GPS. Enthusiasts geotag photos to show where they've gone on vacation. It's one more tool for pros to help sort their photos; it may be a future requirement of stock houses that broker images. Geotagging should be integral to Lightroom: You should be able to key in a street address, point of interest, or lat/long fix within Lightroom. Also, map location should be a searchable feature across all your images: Show all photos taken in Florida, on Sanibel Island, etcetera. It's time to move past the crutch of clumsy third-party add-ons and the handful of cameras with built-in GPS.

Face detection. Face detection seems like an enthusiast feature, but as the ability to recognize individual faces grows, it could be a welcome tool for a news, portrait, wedding, or sports photographer. Imagine shooting 3-5 photos each of a dozen people at a meeting (or party) and Lightroom could group them. How about a future edition of Lightroom that could recognize jersey numbers on the sports field or race cars by their numbers and sponsor logos?

A serious slideshow tool. To get a slideshow out of Lightroom, you have to point a gun to its head and even then you're still stuck with side panels (menus) that tell viewers "work in progress." All users ask for is something simple: Make the default slideshow look as good as iPhoto circa 2005. Make it start right away when you hit Ctrl-Enter. Fill the screen with the image, not with borders, shadows, gray backgrounds and a Lightroom identity plate. Offer Ken Burns effect panning and maybe a half-dozen transitions (that's enough). Allow more than one song per slideshow.

A mainstream crop tool. When you crop or re-crop a photo, most software treats the image as a photo fixed on a table and you move the crop mask over it. Lightroom says tomahto where the rest of the world says tomato: When you re-crop, the photo slides while the mask stays fixed. So, offer users a switch that does it the mainstream way, too. Also: For users in a hurry, let Lightroom optionally predict three possible crops based on its analysis of the scene, overlay them on the image, and you a) click on the one you want, b) click on the best one and adjust slightly, or c) ignore and crop own. Make it easier to vertically crop a horizontal photo; currently you have to perform a tiresome zig-zag motion with the mouse. Let users optionally crop outward from a center point. And let users export slideshow photos with crops 10% wider for images being used in a Ken Burns slideshow.

Warnings of mass destruction. It's not easy to tell if you have one photo selected, two, or all 20,000 in your catalogue before you apply a change - star rating, caption, exposure correction - and Lightroom really should warn you. Lightroom does keep a history of changes made, but not in all five modules of the program, and no change is ever made to the original photo (instead, there's a database of edits that applied on export or viewing). So your photo isn't ruined (your day, maybe, with the time spent backtracking). But undoing one oops you only recognized now isn't easy.

That's what Adobe should do. Really, all I'm asking is that Adobe become truly aware of the awesome features in Google Picasa (free) and Apple Aperture ($80 direct; see pcmag.com review), and adapt the best of them to Lightroom. When you take the work of someone else, that's plagiarism, but when you take from several, that's research.

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